


Pay the Toll

by The_girl_from_the_river



Category: The Wrath and the Dawn Series - Renée Ahdieh
Genre: F/F, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:54:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24077056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_girl_from_the_river/pseuds/The_girl_from_the_river
Summary: Shahrzad and Khalid are soulmates, but Shahrzad doesn't know, and Khalid doesn't tell her. In which anything written on a soulmate's skin shows up in kind on one's soulmate's.
Relationships: Shahrzad al-Khayzuran/Khalid Ibn al-Rashid
Comments: 6
Kudos: 37





	Pay the Toll

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own the characters, setting, or plot.  
> All the quotations are as accurate as I could make them.  
> There are no repeated dialogue from the book, so you don't have to painfully relive scenes.  
> I hope you enjoy :)

The first mark appeared the day the rain came. Shahrzad hadn’t seen it. She had danced in the rain. She’d let it sing songs of miracles upon her skin. She’d let her hair soak beyond any hope of salvaging.

She’d held Shiva’s hands. She’d swung around and around. She’d let the infinities of the world momentarily engulf her. She’d laughed.

Shiva was the one who noticed it.

They’d huddled together that night- shivering under their drenched clothing- and discussed it. It had not washed away under heaven’s tears. That meant it had been drawn on someone else's skin. 

The word passed like a secret between them. _Soulmate._

Shiva had not met hers, but the two of them knew that the person in question was female. They’d seen Henna bloom down Shiva’s arms on festival and fasting days. She’d passed it off as her own. She did not know if her parents would approve of a match between two of the same gender.

Shahrzad's match had written but once, on her left forearm.

_“Words alone are mere scratchings on the page. The power behind them lies with the person.”_

She’d been three-and-a-half. She’d always thought it was a dream, because no marks had come since. Not so much as a stain of ink on her fingers. She had assumed that she was matchless.

But now there was proof. It was a single vertical line on the inside of her wrist. Easy to miss. 

It didn’t take long for her to stop celebrating it.

\----

Khalid sat alone at his desk, as he stared down at the parchment.

_“How does one begin to apologize for robbing the world of light?”_

His room was fittingly gloomy at this hour of the night. An oil lamp made the light on the page dance. The brightening sky beyond his window did not offer enough to write by.

A small knock came at the door. Khalid did not answer it. It was not a summons. It was telling him that the deed was done. Another had joined the ranks of those he’d failed to save.

Letting out a breath of air, Khalid turned his mind to the girl. Shiva. He tried to form a prayer for her departed soul, but all that came to him was the agonizing beating of his heart. Perhaps that would be enough for heaven. Remorse.

The boy king lifted his quill from the parchment. He drew a single line through the fourteenth group. Seventy. The tallies were in organized rows. As orderly as everything else in his chamber. Battalions of his sins, marching across his skin. 

He didn’t know if he was still capable of tears.

Khalid turned again to the parchment. To the plea of a lost soul.

_“Words seem strangely insufficient in such a case, yet I fall to their uselessness in my own inadequacy.”_

His eyes moved again to his arm.

To his shock- and immediate horror- something else had been written on it. The word was small and had been written by a trembling hand. 

_“Shiva”_

That word was all it took. Some depth of regret he had miraculously not plumbed swam up to lodge in his throat. 

Khalid had hoped his soulmate was dead. He had begged that among the penned letters be her name. He had depended upon her being gone.

But no. She was very much alive.

He was not a fool. He could recognize grief when it tugged at a writer’s hand. How many times had he seen his own penmanship marred by its invisible machinations?

His soulmate knew his tallies for what they were. And she knew the seventy first for who it represented. 

_“Please know I will never forget Shiva...”_

\----

Shahrzad had doubted at first, but as time went on, it became increasingly obvious that someone was tracking the girl’s deaths. It could be a rioter, or even the executioner himself. Shahrzad didn’t know.

After the first ten, her mate had begun placing a single mark above the rest. A lonely tally. Shahrzad did not want to wonder what it was. 

Torn. That’s how she had felt at Shiva’s mark. Split into several pieces. Incapable of anything but silence and sorrow.

The marks had been washed off, smudged, and wiped. But always they appeared again. Someone would not let her forget.

The marks were a constant reminder. It could be partially blamed on them that she went knocking on the devil’s door.

\----

The dreams began the night after Shiva’s death. Khalid would have been hesitant to call it a recurring dream, but they happened three times in that one night. Then again the next.

It was the worst sort of dream. The sort that gave you what you needed for the pure intent of reminding you that you don’t have it. Or even deserve it.

In his dream he slept with a girl. She was nameless, and faceless, but still she made an imprint on Khalid’s mind. With her, he had felt at peace. But every time, he awoke, feeling the painful loss of something that didn’t exist.

The third day after Shiva’s death, he got out of bed at dawn. He hadn’t slept. 

He let the rush to his head level out, and padded across the onyx to his desk. Picking up his quill, he refurbished the tallies. In a moment of grim inspiration, he dabbed ink onto his third finger. 

Pulling the king's ring over the smudge, he left his chamber. 

\----

Khalid saw it when he walked onto the training grounds. Shahrzad flexed her hand on the bow's grip as she shot. Encircling her middle finger was a smudge the color of soot. 

\-----

Shahrzad never found out. She was not as quiet as Khalid. Not as observant. And he was too careful.

The only hint he ever gave to her was when she was gone. When he returned to find Rey in smoldering pieces. 

\----

Shahrzad noticed it just before she fell asleep after two days of riding. It was written on her forearm where the tallies usually were.

_“There is no one I’d rather see the sunrise with than you.”_


End file.
